


here's to a son to the house of Frankenstein

by too_much_in_the_sun



Category: Frankenstein (1931)
Genre: Gen, in which: absolutely nothing happens
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-29
Updated: 2013-10-29
Packaged: 2019-09-06 19:25:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16838896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/too_much_in_the_sun/pseuds/too_much_in_the_sun
Summary: The youth of Henry Frankenstein.





	here's to a son to the house of Frankenstein

**Author's Note:**

> Written / posted to Tumblr on 29 October 2013. I probably intended to take this up until at least the start of the movie, but evidently this is as far as I got, and now I'm posting it, as I belatedly move content off of my Tumblr and onto a better host.

Until he turned fourteen, Henry Frankenstein lived a charmed life.

His earliest memories were of Nanny's gentle hands, brushing out his hair, which was blond and slightly curling, worn long. He sat quietly while she brushed out the tangles and snarls, and when she was done she patted him on the head and gave him a biscuit. Ernest squalled from his crib in the next room.

He saw his parents but little until he was ten. Father, he understood vaguely, worked in the city. Mother called on her friends or entertained in their parlor. He was strictly forbidden to venture downstairs at these times, but sat at the top of the stairs in a storm of excitement to listen to his mother and her friends talking in low voices, his wool stockings itching on his calves.

His hair darkened as he grew older, and the year he was ten, Nanny presented him with his first pair of long pants, tears glittering in her eyes.

That same year they moved house in a great tumult, from Geneva to London. His mother's conferrings with her friends turned often to the subject of war, and he listened keenly -- Ernest had dragged him into games of toy soldiers often enough, but Henry felt no real draw to war as his brother did.

London seemed little different than Geneva had been. Nanny was overjoyed to have returned to the city of her own childhood, and snuck him out of the house frequently for walks in the districts of the city that his parents forbade him. He held her hand and took in the new world around him hungrily, trying to memorize every sight, every scent, every sound. The house in London as in Geneva was quiet, velvet-edged, restrained. London beat like a heart with a pulsing life of its own.

His parents hired a different tutor for him. In Geneva Nanny had overseen his education in reading and writing, but in London a Russian man came four times a week to teach him math, geography, classics -- and biology.

They went to the Zoo and to the British Museum, and at dinner his parents inquired about these visits, asked which exhibits he preferred. His answers were solemn, and his mother stifled a smile behind one small, delicate hand.

His tutor also took him to Hyde Park and Covent Garden, among other places; places he had visited secretly with Nanny and now visited secretly with this taciturn Russian. The clothes of the scion of the Frankenstein family were neat and well-tailored, and Henry felt a flash of how out of place he was in Covent Garden, how pale and clear his skin was compared to the rough, dirty countenances of the street urchins who appeared to be of his age.

One day in the summer of his fourteenth year, the two of them ventured to Covent Garden, now a familiar locale. The Russian sent him to sit for a quarter of an hour on a bench, and gave him the end of a loaf of bread to feed the pigeons, at which his tutor disappeared into the crowds. Henry sat, and shredded the bread, and searched the crowd for the familiar form of his tutor.

His tutor materialized exactly a quarter of an hour later, holding a paper sack that dripped water. Henry asked what it was, and the Russian shook his head. "Tomorrow, I will show you."

The next morning, just as he had said, the tutor called Henry into the room where his lessons were given. The black-topped desk that they used for scientific demonstrations had been placed in the center of the room, and a strange apparatus sat atop it -- a tray and two large batteries from whose apexes rose curling rubber wires that dipped into the unseen space inside the tray.

He inched closer. The Russian smiled slightly. "It won't bite you. Look."

He looked into the tray, assessed its contents. A dead frog, pins through its feet securing it to the India-rubber mat on which it lay. Blood oozed sluggishly from the punctures.

"We have been learning about Galvani," said the Russian. "This is one of his tricks."

The Russian clipped the ends of the electrodes to the skin of the frog, seemingly at random. Henry leaned forward intently, and the flat click as the Russian flipped some unseen switch seemed like the backfire of an automobile in the summer air.

The frog began to twitch.

Henry saw, all at once, the vague outlines of some grand, strange purpose that had been laid out for him -- the lines of a long road on which he had taken the first step. Some great machine had been set in motion, and he was now powerless to stop it.

On his birthday that year, war came to Europe.


End file.
